“There’s very few islands like this off the Connecticut coast that are nesting areas for herons and egrets so any human disturbance that they encounter here --- I mean they have enough to deal with they have avian predators, they have raccoon predators, so you throw in the people too sometimes it’s just one too many things.”

Jenny Dickson, also with the D.E.P., says the nesting birds get agitated when people come by. The adults fly off. The chicks sometimes fall to the ground

“Once they fall out of the nest they’re much more likely to either die of exposure or die of predation. When you have things like that happen you lose a lot of reproduction in the colony. If adults are disturbed too much they’ll also abandoned a colony and sometimes they’ll abandon it for decades.”